


Interesting Times

by SandyQuinn



Category: Discworld
Genre: M/M, superdisc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-11 10:11:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1171819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SandyQuinn/pseuds/SandyQuinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A modern superhero AU of Discworld. A short writing focusing on Rincewind and Ponder aaaand that's about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interesting Times

 

For as long as Rincewind remembers, he's had a sense of loneliness in him.

Everyone feels alone sometimes: Sometimes people are genuinely alone and sometimes they simply imagine the situation to be so. There is, however, a sort of universal need to belong that people usually possess, a feeling of togetherness that comes from having a family or a friend or even sharing a class with other people that distracts them from the simple fact that we come to this world alone and we leave with no company.

For as long as Rincewind remembers, he’s never been able to distract himself.

It isn’t that he doesn’t have friends, or acquaintances, or even- well, his family consists of his grandfather in the old folk’s home, but he still counts, to Rincewind. It’s just that deep down, somewhere in his core, he knows he can’t depend on anyone but himself.

It takes something away from romance that he can’t begin to understand in the first place. Perhaps he’s just not a very romantic soul: He tries, but there’s an awful, dryly unamused part of his mind that sheds a light of realism on every soft pink dream, no matter how hard he tries to hold on. It doesn’t mean that he’s incapable of love, but the kind of passionate, rosy romance from stories seems… like it belongs into stories.

He falls in love when he’s twenty, with a girl working in a library. She has brown hair and intelligent eyes, and she’s probably quite a bit smarter than he is – he admits this to her, with a small crooked smile, and makes her laugh, because she thinks he’s complimenting her.

It doesn’t last very long. In the back of his mind, he feels like he should be something more, like she wants him to be something more that he can’t be as he is, slightly too thin, with a ratty face and a sandy hair and not a lot of ambition. Why would he risk falling on his face, with his limited gifts? He just wants to be content.

Rincewind is the first to admit that his life is not perfect, with a job he’s barely holding onto, a leaky memory, only a few mates who like him enough to have drinks with him, a small, messy apartment and a stubble he can’t quite manage to shave off. He wallows in self-pity sometimes, but then again, there is some natural instinct in him to be melancholy, so he lets it be and just lives.

When Rincewind first sees Ponder Stibbon’s worried face and wide eyes behind the round, owlish glasses, he feels a sort of pained camaraderie and instant recognition of- something they both share that their surrounding lacks. He holds Ponder back a few seconds to give him some of the most valuable advice the young man is going to need in the lab. He feels almost good about his good deed of the day, especially when he sees Ponder avoiding the macaroni at the cafeteria later on, and thinks nothing more of it.

They talk a little, but Rincewind keeps to himself a lot these days, mostly to avoid his superiors from noticing how bad his memory really is. He reaches out a few times, like during that first meeting, and on a few occasions: Like when Ponder is visibly wilting after a put-down from Ridcully. Rincewind is not very good at comforting, so he explains that Ridcully needs to shout at something in five-minute intervals to keep his brain from shutting down. It seems to cheer up the young man anyway.

Ponder keeps out of trouble, but Rincewind is good at noticing things anyway: And he sees the plans and calculations Ponder produces, finally believing what Henry said when they first met. Ponder is practically a genius.

It causes Rincewind to consider some hard, cold facts, like that eventually the young man will be unable to hold himself back, or that there is a certain limit of staff members, or that Rincewind has been doing worse and worse since his incident.

He finally voluenteers for an experiment, figuring that earning extra points and becoming slightly more valuable might keep him on a little longer. The rest, as they say, is history.

Super-speed doesn’t actually change Rincewind’s life as much as one would imagine. Under the buzzing and the blurred lines of his silhouette he is still the same person with practically the same job, the same stubble and the same lines under his eyes. It simply locks his life in place, pushes him to a direction he barely tolerates and in a way it is a slap in the face, a wake-up call to him, although he’s not quite sure what to do with it, that is, until Ponder grabs his wrist to examine muscle density, and looks him over with the kind of hunger in his eyes Rincewind hadn’t seen since a girl in high school took a sudden fancy to him.

Ponder is… not quite as young as Rincewind first thought. Young physically, yes, young in years, but Rincewind recognizes the similiarty, the solitude, the aged soul. Granted, Ponder is a dreamer, a reacher, constantly building something and armed with naivete, but Rincewind finds it less distasteful than he thought he would. Besides which, Ponder talks to him, not at him.

He mentions that he’s never really been drunk and Rincewind takes him to a pub, the same night, even buys a few drinks with the bonus money the apologetic university paid to him after the experiment, and watches as Ponder starts to slur more and more, drinks too and lets himself babble about stories that people tell themselves. He tells Ponder that he’s never been the hero of his own story and Ponder nods solemnly, and something in it makes Rincewind laugh instead of being annoyed: Because he knows his theories are stupid but Ponder is so drunk that his glasses are crooked, and Rincewind feels that maybe it doesn’t matter.

They try to make him wear spandex, and he refuses, until Ponder eagerly explains why it’s both expected, traditional, and sensible: He feels a bang of paranoia, that Ponder’s eager fanboyism over superheroes is rubbing off on him, but he puts the spandex on anyway.

He thinks he can feel someone’s eyes on him, but it might be just his imagination.


End file.
